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Author: Iris

Whatever Happened to Library Blogs?

Published by Iris on Monday, November 17th, 2008

Something’s shifted. Maybe it’s just that I’ve shifted. My life has become almost unrecognizable compared to a year ago, so I wouldn’t rule this possibility out just yet. But even so, I’m inclined to think that the landscape and function of librarians’ blogs is in the process of a transformation.

Two years ago, I mentioned that participating in the biblioblogosphere was like attending a conference every day. A year ago, a good portion of my evenings were spent reading, thinking about, and responding to other librarians’ blogs. This was what kept me feeling connected to the larger world of librarianship. This was what made me feel useful beyond my own patron community. And this was a major source of contact with librarians whom I had come to regard as friends.

But lately, I wake up to find that my RSS aggregator has very few new posts from this once-prolific core of librarian bloggers, and I certainly haven’t been contributing to anyone’s aggregator overload recently. Not by a long stretch.

In my darker moments, I worry that we’re a little bit burned out, or that we’ve given up trying to change the world by weighing in on issues large and small. But while there may be some of this at work, I think it has more to do with a shift in communication patterns. Two years ago, blogs provided a venue for people’s carefully thought-out ideas as well as for their off-the-cuff thoughts, gut reactions, and general banter. In this way, they were like the sessions and the between- and after-session banter at a conference. Today I think that blogs have begun to take on the more focused character of the actual sessions at a conference while places like Twitter and FriendFeed have become the venue for the between-and after-session banter. We pass each other in the micro-blogging hallway, have conversations about everything from OCLC’s latest craziness to weekend entertainment plans, shout hello to other passers-by, and show each other our pictures or the latest new gaget we’re playing with. Then, when we have something more formal to say, we take the time to sit down and compose a blog post to present to our peers.

Then again, maybe this is just a very long justification for the decline and fall of a small portion of the librarian blogosphere.

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Non-Verbals in Online Communities

Published by Iris on Friday, November 14th, 2008

A while ago somebody asked me why I was worried about one of my online friends. How could I tell that this friend had probably been through a terrible weekend? He hadn’t posted anything online about it, and he lives clear across the country, and I’ve never met him in person. So what was the clue?

I didn’t know. But I knew that I’d worried about that friend all weekend and ended up being proven right, unfortunately.

Talking to people in person, we use non-verbals as huge clues about how that person is feeling. I can see when people are tired by the way they carry themselves, the look in their eyes, the pace of their speech, their tone of voice. All of these tiny clues add up to a fairly clear picture of tiredness, and I don’t even have to think about processing this information. I just know it, and I respond accordingly.

But I’m beginning to think that there are non-verbals to online communication as well. As a community gels, I get used to the kinds of words people use, the pace of their posts, the times when I can expect silence, and the times when I can expect excitement. These things have very little to do with the actual content of their posts but everything to do with the person on the other end of the posts.

It’s kind of amazing, actually, and incredibly touching to see a community keeping tabs on its members and reaching out when things seem off. I’ve had friends check in with me when I stopped posting for a while, and I’ve seen the same happen for others. And just this week I was floored when, after posting that computer monitors were seeming painfully bright all of a sudden, a friend said she’d thought this sounded like a migraine, except that “Iris doesn’t get migraines.” And I don’t. Or rather, I hadn’t until yesterday. (They’re not fun, by the way, in case you had any doubts. I say that knowing full well that mine was a light-weight in the land of migraines.) This friend didn’t have to investigate past posts and think about whether she’d ever heard me talk about migraines before. She just knew that this was different. The fact that she knew this kind of thing just reinforced for me that it’s not just what we post online that lets people know who we are, it’s also what we don’t post, and how we post what we do post.

In a world of text, this is the kind of thing that replaces non-verbal communication. This is the kind of thing that allows online communities become more than just a group of people with similar interests.

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Emerging Themes from Internet Librarian – Ethnography of Online Life

Published by Iris on Monday, October 27th, 2008

It’s a curious thing, going to a conference. A healthy chunk of the presenters are people I know and talk with all the time, so I’m often familiar with their topics and sometimes even with their approaches. And yet, the experience of going, sitting, and attending sessions back to back, hour after hour, day after day is still enlightening. It’s not so much that I learned new facts (though there was a little of that, too). No, it’s that when you sit through that many sessions, themes emerge from the periphery, gather form and substance, and finally strut around in all their splendor.

The theme that emerged most strongly for me at this conference was ethnography. Previous conferences have trumpeted tools, change, and stories, but this is the first time that I saw a collective desire to understand what it means to inhabit this online world.

Rather than lead us on tours of tools and services, more than one presenter echoed Cliff Landis’ statement that it’s not enough to have an account any more, you have to participate. Over and over we heard about presenting ourselves as humans online, not as institutions. Sometimes this means presenting yourself as a professional (Elizabeth Edwards’ session on an ethnography of Facebook made this point),* but even professionals have personality, and personality is as important online as off. danah boyd spoke compellingly about how an online profile is our digital body that we adorn as if we were getting dressed in the morning.** And both Greg and I spoke about online identity.

Not only are we finally taking a closer look at what it means to inhabit these online spaces, but the online spaces are becoming more integrated with our off-line spaces. As the two worlds come closer together, as the process of switching from one to the other becomes less and less of an action that requires thought and decision, and as computing becomes more and more ubiquitous, these issues of social norms and interpersonal interactions are bubbling to the surface and commanding our attention. How refreshing! This was the first conference in a long while that didn’t rely primarily on listing Tools You Should Know and instead concentrated on interacting with people online.

* A very similar presentation to the one we saw was blogged here.
**For excellent notes on this talk, see Jenica’s blog.

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A Side Effect of Social Networks That I Hadn’t Anticipated

Published by Iris on Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008

I’ve noticed a curious trend here at Internet Librarian. Those sessions led by LSW members are consistently of high quality. They were informative, humorous, to the point, and organized. Those sessions led by non-LSW members are a very mixed bag. A couple were brilliant (I’m thinking of danah boyd, especially). A few were definitely not.

One explanation could be that we’ve managed to amass a group of cool librarians that are also good presenters. And while I think this is definitely true, I don’t think it’s the whole story. For one thing, if this were the whole story, I’d expect to see improvement in those of us who’ve spoken a lot, and I’d expect to see newer presenters from the group playing a bit of catch-up. I’m not really seeing that, though. It seems like the entire group, veteran and newbie speakers alike, churned out really high-quality work.

My theory is that the fact that we keep up with each other online, and the fact that we all know and respect each other, enticed everyone to step up and make sure that what they presented would be top notch. Put simply, everyone was proving to everyone else that they were cool enough to belong in the group. Even those who had never spoken at a national conference before had a reputation to maintain in front of a crowd of seriously talented, smart, and funny peers.

There’s a down-side to this network effect, too. We generally knew a lot of the facts presented already, since we’d already presented them to our peers online. Still, I heard several things expressed in person in ways that I hadn’t heard online. And the sheer mass of presentations and discussions juxtaposed against each other highlighted some trends that I would probably have missed otherwise.

The conference is over now, and we’re all scattering back to our respective homes. The conversation about librarianship will continue, though, as we keep up with each other online. I wonder what this means for the quality of next year’s conference. Only good things, I imagine.

Next up: actual information from sessions. I promise. I’m working on it.

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